How to make bubble solution (2024)

Do you remember making huge and awesome bubbles with a bucket of water mixed with dish soap when you were little? I remember we used to tie a string to a stick and we’d easily make these cool and giant bubbles! I don’t know if dish soap is different now than it was 25 years ago, but it doesn’t seem to be as simple as I remember it being?

I have had zero luck with mixing random amounts of water and dish soap, so I’ve had to resort to using a bubble recipe to get decent bubbles. This recipe makes super strong bubbles that you supposedly can hold in your hand if you are wearing a glove. It really is too bad that we didn’t have a glove handy because that would have been really fun to try!

How to make bubble solution

This is the recipe from Steve Spangler Science except I only had Sunlight dish soap, not Dawn.

• 1 cup of distilled water (I just used water filtered through our Brita)
• 2 Tbsp dish soap
• 1 Tbsp glycerin (available at the pharmacy)

Mix everything together, and then WAIT AT LEAST 24 HOURS before you start using it. Apparently it needs to sit to help strengthen the bonds (the bonds of what, I’m not entirely sure, but it definitely makes better bubbles if you wait.)

Kind of cool how the glycerin sunk to the bottom, and the dish soap sat on top of it:

And as an aside, I highly recommend mixing this in something bigger than a 1 cup measuring cup! I had to make the switch to a bigger bowl when I realized I couldn’t stir it without making a huge mess!

We waited the recommended 24 hours (okay, actually only 22 hours) before we used our homemade bubble solution and I have to say, it did make really good bubbles!

It was definitely a step up from the bubble solution we normally buy at the store. (Did I mention that it’s next to impossible to get a good photograph of a bubble on a windy day?)

They even sat on the grass for a few seconds before popping:

I definitely recommend giving this bubble recipe a try! When we go to make it again, I’m going to try it with distilled water and see if we can make it even better.

If you are making homemade bubble solution, I definitely recommend using a recipe. Last year we tried a few times to make our own bubble recipe by adding random amounts of things and it just didn’t work out at ALL. I didn’t think we’d actually get good bubbles out of this recipe, but I was definitely pleasantly surprised!